Erlang does go way beyond concurrency into the domain of distributed and highly-reliable systems, and has more than lessons for us IMO - together with OTP, it’s

Erlang does go way beyond concurrency into the domain of distributed and highly-reliable systems, and has more than lessons for us IMO - together with OTP, it’s still arguably one of the most effective and battle-tested environments for highly concurrent systems. Like anything, it has its envelope and sweet spots, as well as its warts. Some people find the Erlang language syntax to be ugly; I quite like it and find it easier to comprehend in general than Elixir, which is much more verbose to my eyes (except for the very nice pipe operator!) Yes, the semicolon / period thing in Erlang can be annoying, but not so much that it really gets in my way. The tooling can be a real barrier to entry, and I’m glad that Elixir is bringing more people into the fold, although I can’t bring myself to really like Elixir for purely subjective reasons. For example, one of my major complaints about Elixir is that it is literally Erlang with some syntax changes, rewritten libraries, and extensions like macros - but if you don’t grok Erlang thoroughly, you will get frustrated when you hit the bottom layer - like exceptions and error messages - and it’s full of Erlang data structures. I had the same reaction when working with non-Java languages targeting the JVM. They all feel a bit like bolt-on kits. At some point, you really need to understand the core. In my opinion, of course.